The Lyceum Committee is happy to report that there will be an exhibit at the Adams Gallery of the Suffolk Law School on Tremont St. (across from Park St. Church) from February 7-March 22 on Chiang Yee and his book "The Silent Traveler in Boston". Those who attended the Lyceum talk last year given by Dr. Da Zheng on Chiang Yee and his Silent Traveler books will want to stop by to see the exhibit and renew their acquaintance.- Dorothy Africa

March 1: “Exploring and Experiencing a Different Perspective” withPhil and Janet Vitiello. Janet and Phil travelled to Israel/Palestine as part of an Interfaith Peace Builders’ Delegation. Like most of us, they knew about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict primarily from our media outlets and from Israeli sources. They wanted to get a different perspective and to see for themselves conditions in Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank. Come to this Lyceum to hear what they learned and how this trip changed them.

March 8: “UTEC: Trading Violence and Poverty for Social and Economic Success” with Nancy Schiavone, Director of Development, and other members of the staff. UTEC (United Teen Equality Center) is an award winning and nationally recognized non-profit helping young people in Lowell and Lawrence move from violence and poverty to social and economic success. Members of the staff will provide an overview of the organization’s history, programming and future growth plans that include several new public policy initiatives. UTEC’s programming will be brought to life with a video presentation created by filmmaker and photographer Cameron Zohoori, who joined UTEC as a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow through Duke University. Through his work, you will get an inside look at UTEC’s street worker and workforce development programs and hear directly from UTEC youth about life on the streets and their journey to a more hopeful and prosperous future.

March 15: “Earth’s Ionosphere and Space Weather” with Bodo Reinisch.The discovery of an electrically conductive layer in the upper atmosphere at the beginning of the last century had far reaching technological and scientific consequences. In 1902, “wireless radio” communication over long distances using ionospherically reflected radio signals was demonstrated by Guglielmo Marconi with high-frequency radio transmissions from France to Newfoundland and from Cape Cod to England. Today we use wireless radio everywhere, and for satellite-to-surface radio links the signals must propagate through the ionosphere which refracts the radio waves, i.e., bends the radio beam thus limiting for example the accuracy of GPS positioning. Discovery and exploration of the ionosphere eventually led to the space age. Earth’s ionosphere is a thin plasma (free electrons and ions), forming the threshold to space, which consists to more than 99% of plasma. In the solar system, electromagnetic and particle radiation from the sun controls the ‘space weather and climate’ in Earth’s larger environment, the magnetosphere, as well as the ‘tropospheric weather and climate’ we experience at Earth’s surface.

Bodo Reinisch was invited in 1965 to come from the University of Freiburg in Germany to the University of Massachusetts Lowell (then Lowell Technological Institute) to join in ionospheric research sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Hanscom AFB. He resides on Overlook Drive in Bedford since 1967.

March 22: “The Good Woman in Early Ireland: A Shifting Paradigm in a Changing Society” with Dorothy Africa. This talk will consider the ideal of the ‘Good Woman’ in early Christian Ireland, by examining the early Irish literary, legal, and hagiographical literature to explore the status, expectations, and circumstances of Irish women as reflected in them. The social circumstances of women’s religious communities in Ireland will be considered in light of this new social landscape as reflected in the hagiographical literature and other historical sources. The surviving evidence raises more questions than it provides answers.

March 29, SPECIAL TIME 12:30-2pm: “They Were Not Silent” – a documentary about the Jewish Labor Committee's anti-Nazi movement in America before, during and after World War II. The film features rare archival footage and photographs along with interviews with labor veterans, Holocaust survivors and scholars. It explores how international Jewry worked to help Jews and non-Jews in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Europe.

Our parishioner Hanna Papanek was interviewed for the film. She will discuss it in the context of her own experiences as well as her research on the Jewish Labor Committee.

April 12: Hank Phillipi Ryan, author of “Truth Be Told.”Hank will be joining us to talk about her books. Her latest, Truth Be Told, was named a Library Journal Best Thriller of 2014 and is now an Agatha nominee for Best Contemporary Mystery.